Spotify working on algorithm that knows when you’re sad or angry

Spotify has patented a new technology that will let it use speech recognition to determine users “emotional state, gender, age, or accent” so that it can better recommend content to them.

The patent, called “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal”, would use information about “intonation, stress, rhythm and the likes of units of speech” that Spotify could use to tell whether a user is “happy, angry, afraid, sad or neutral”, reports MusicBusinessWorldwide.

Spotify is developing this technology because asking users to provide personal information, such as their likes and dislikes, requires them “to tediously input answers to multiple queries in order for the system to identify the user’s tastes”.

“What is needed is an entirely different approach to collecting taste attributes of a user”, Spotify’s patent reads, so that human activity is “at least partially eliminated”.